Beverages such as soft drinks, coffee, hot soups and the like are often dispensed into plastic and paper cups, onto which lids may be applied for safety and cleanliness. However, the sanitation of cup lids is often defeated in the process of placing the lids on cups, since the lids are commonly dispensed from open containers or free standing stacks, as a result of which they may be and often are dropped on the floor, scattered about on tables and handled by several people before being placed on a cup and delivered to a customer. Also, when the lids are in a free standing stack, they can become stuck together, making it necessary to use both hands to separate a single lid from the stack, which necessitates the expenditure of unnecessary time in manually separating and dispensing lids, and thereby hinders food service efficiency.
In an attempt to overcome the problems of free standing stacks of lids and placement of lids on open surfaces, and excessive handling of lids, vertical cylinders or other upright containers have been developed for holding and dispensing cup lids. While such dispensing cylinders are convenient, problems arises in dispensing lids from the cylinders, since a stack of substantially interlocked lids impedes horizontal movement and removal of individual lids from the bottom of the stack, such that lids can only be conveniently removed from the bottom of the stack with downward motion of the bottom lid, but this motion is generally difficult to achieve with prior designs of vertically standing cup lid containers. Consequently, many current designs of lid dispensers provide for dispensing of lids from the top of a stack of lids in a vertically standing dispenser. A problem with the design is that the dispensers are refilled from the top, and whenever a dispenser is refilled before it is empty, cup lids toward the bottom of the dispenser that remain from previous refill(s) experience an extended residence time in the dispense and their sanitation is compromised, ultimately resulting in disposal of the lids.
There is a need for an economical, easy to use, space saving cup lid dispenser that will handle lids in a sanitary fashion and provide for convenient manual dispensing of lids one at a time from the bottom of a stack of lids.